We first meet Disgust and Anger in the movie Inside Out at the Andersens’ dinner table. Young Riley is in her highchair, and her dad is offering her a spoonful of broccoli while her mom watches. Disgust enters the control room for the first time, surveys the situation, and announces, “Hold on, Guys. It’s broccoli!” She prompts Riley to yell, “Yuck!” while upending the bowl, leaving broccoli on her dad’s face. He responds by threatening to skip dessert. Anger suddenly comes to attention and moves to the control panel, leading Riley to scream and push the remaining food onto the floor. This 51-second scene hits home for almost all parents.
Many parents and parenting advisors consider situations like this “power struggles.” This wording suggests a war of wills between the strong-willed child and the parents who must enforce their parental authority. Open-relational parenting takes a different approach and thinks children are developing humans who are learning about relationships with others. It sees parents as loving guides who hope their children will eat broccoli, but even more, want to teach them to communicate and cooperate with others better. One way that open-relational parenting differs from classical parenting is in its understanding of power.
Bernard Loomer describes two ways of thinking about power that are helpful when considering the parent-child relationship.1 He first describes linear or unilateral power as trying to meet our own goals by changing someone or something else without being changed ourselves. Parents who use unilateral power have a preconceived desired result they try to achieve by changing the child’s ideas without listening to them.
Loomer’s second model of power is relational power, which results in being changed by someone or something else while also creating change in them. Robert Mesle outlines three parts of relational power: “the ability to be actively open and affected by the world around us, the ability to create ourselves out of what we have taken in, and the ability to influence those around us by having been first affected by them.” 2 A parent who uses relational power listens to their child, sets a goal based on their input combined with the original plans, and then guides the child toward the new objective.
When applying a relational model of power to parenting, we must consider the child’s developmental stage. It is easy to imagine using this model with adult children. While planning an upcoming vacation with our girls and their partners, we asked each to share what was most important about the trip from their perspective. After everyone heard each other’s priorities, the plan changed slightly, hopefully leading to a fun vacation for all.
Newborns are different from adult children. They can’t use words to express their needs and desires and haven’t experienced enough life to know their possibilities for the next moment. However, they experience the present and can communicate something about how they feel and what they need. Parents have the substantial job of using all their perceptions to “listen” to what the infant is communicating. How parents utilize openness changes as children develop. The key is continuing to look for ways to understand them best at each stage.
So, what happened with Riley’s broccoli fiasco? Thankfully, Riley’s dad listened to what was going on with her feelings and changed in response. He pretended the broccoli-loaded spoon was an airplane and made zooming noises while steering it toward Riley’s mouth. His redirection calmed down Anger and Disgust, letting Joy take over as Riley ate the bite. Of course, parenting moments don’t always go this smoothly and sometimes don’t accomplish the goal in the end. Even then, if we actively listen to our children and are open to being changed by them, we build our relationship with them instead of engaging in a power struggle.
1 Bernard Loomer, “Two Conceptions of Power,” Process Studies 6, no. 1 (1976): 5–32.
2 Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton, 2008), 73.
photo: pexels, barnabas davoti
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